Levain Quantities in Ken Forkish's "Flour Water Salt Yeast"

Levain Quantities in Ken Forkish's "Flour Water Salt Yeast"

I'm planning to make Ken Forkish's Overnight Country Blonde from his book "Flour Water Salt Yeast" tomorrow. I got the book today and I can't wait to try the 1.8 kg boule version.

He instructs to prepare about 1kg levain to make a bread that requires only 216 g. Granted, it's an easy fix. I'll just scale down to 1/4 his levain quantities.

Since I'm borderline obsessive-compulsive, I went back and read the chapter on levain, which I skiped entirely when I first was perusing through the book. In that chapter he suggests scaling down his 80% hydration levain formula, giving weights to pare down to half the amount as an example.

Still, why on the bread formulas' pages, after bringing attention on how he modified his instructions, techniques and quantities to accomodate for the home baker at several occasions in the preceeding chapters, instruct to prepare a 1 kg batch of levain for a bread that requires 216 g of it (or even 360 g in other formulas in the book)? Am I missing something?

I think it's just lazy writing (or editing) and would be corrected in further editions of the book. No baker in their right mind will sweep away 700-800 g of levain p e r b o u l e of bread. And professional bakers do control temperatures, so 50 g of levain in a closed container work just as well as 500g or 5000g.

I asked the same question when I was baking from FWSY. I use a home proofer to control ambient temperature and was very careful about water temps, so I wasn't sold on the need for huge levain quantities. And I've heard the argument that fermentation proceeds more favorably in larger batches, but no one seemed to be able to pinpoint what I would be giving up by scaling down.

Strangely enough, I thought that when I scaled down the levain that my breads might progress more slowly than his timetables, but the opposite turned out to be true. Everything I made from that book progressed more quickly than his schedules suggested and I had to be careful to nip back fermentation times a bit. Go figure.

The bread from that book that worked the best for me was the bacon sourdough, highly recommended.

I buy 20 kg (44 pounds) sacs of La Milanaise organic bread flour and even in such large quantities, it costs me CAD1.50$ per kg (CAD0.68$ a pound). Eventhough it's not overly expensive, I'm certainly paying attention not to waste any. I'm not about to throw 1$ worth of it in the drain.

Let's just hope not too many levain 1st timers will follow the instructions to the T and get discouraged by the waste.

FlourChild, thank you for the recommandation. I can't but try that one despite my reluctance about handling bacon since my sons are bacon lovers. They adore it even. They certainly didn't get that from me, their muslim mother. I "blame" their catholic father who grew-up with Saturday mornings toasted&buttered bread, sunny-side-ups, crispy canadian bacon and fried potatoes. I'll check the timetable for that bread to have it ready for this Saturday morning. It ain't just when mom is happy that everybody is happy now is it.

what to think about this when you see his video of him chucking the remaining 800 g of levain in the trash and saying it is 'spent fuel'. He can't really think that since the part he is trashing is at its peak for baking and every bit as potent as the 20o g he used. I'm guessing he will be much less cavalier and out of touch with reality in the future. With some many people starving around the world, who can't afford his artisan bread and most likely will never get a chance to taste it - he might want to do some editing of the book and the video that makes him look less than what he must really be like in reality.

This thread has answered a query I posted a few days ago. I reduced the size of my stored starters from 200g to 80g to save on flour waste, and my starters reacted by not rising or showing their usual activity, and I couldn't figure out why. I perhaps now have the answer. I am about to buy this book from Amazon and have watched Ken's videos, so this is timely information for me. Thank you. BTW, I chickened out and reverted back to my 200g fridged starters and they are now happy again! Better perhaps to waste the extra flour than my precious starters IMO.

When I plan to use my oven a lot, knowing my kitchen will heat up to 24°C to 26°C or if it's summer, I go up 110 g total levain because I up the flour and water (10 g levain + 50 g flour + 50 g water) so I don't need to feed it more than twice a day. In August, when the temperature is down right tropical here in Montreal (no AC in this house, after all, a little tropical temp 3 weeks per year can't hurt), I maintain it at 10 g levain + 70 g water + 70 g flour.

With these regimen and quite small levain feeding quantities, I never had a problem. So I suppose it's safe to say it's not the volume/quantity you maintain that makes it lack activity?

I put my 30 g batch of levain in the fridge when I know I'll be out most of the week. I do it once the levain has risen, when it's at its peak. Again, no problem to have it back to full blown activity after removing it from the fridge and feeding it, as long as I don't throw away the liquid that sits on top of it (dark if older and clear if it was in the fridge for less than a week). I just mix the levain well, incorporating back the separated liquid and I feed it in its entirety (30 g levain + 30 g flour + 30 g water). It takes no more than 2 feedings usually before it smells and looks good and I can bake with it.

It's may be worth noting I maintain it with organic sifted bread flour only and always at 100% hydration. I remove part of my regular levain and use it to build a separate one if I need a levain that contains whole wheat or an other type of flour, incorporating the new flour progressively over 2 or 3 feedings, tweaking hydration rate if needed too.

It's also worth noting that I do use tap water but I take care to eliminate chlorine that you can definitely taste and smell in it. I just use my electric kettle, fill it, boil the water and let it cool completely down. It's a routine really. I feed my levain, say in the evening. When I'm finished, if I see my kettle is almost empty, I fill it, plug it and start it then forget about it. In the morning, the water has, of course, totally cooled down and is ready to be used to feed my levain.

you should try feeding your 100% hydration starter and, when it is at its peak, feed it flour only to get it to 65% hydration and let it sit on the counter for an hour before going back into the fridge. No hooch will form on top, a sign the stater is out of food and when you get back just add some water to get it to 100% hydration and feed it as normal. By preparing the starter for the fridge this way you can probably go out of town for a month and it wouldn't notice :-)

You can also leave tap water out on the counter in a container with the lid off for 24 hours and chlorine will dissipate without having to boil it. You can water the plants with it too, if you haven't killed them all like I have :-)

I just followed your directions few minutes ago. I messed up so badly with my country blonde, confusing levain with final dough, that I'm now in the process of baking no less than 9 boules, on top of the 4 Tartines breads I baked yesterday. The freezer will be filled to capacity with bread tonight. So your advice is timely, I won't be using my levain for a while.

That is a lot of bread! Hopefully it will be a really good bake that tastes great. 13 loaves is about 6 weeks of baking, at 2 loaves a week, for me. I already have the freezer full of bread too.... so I would have to give it all away :-) Glad you have room.

Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1US0hJ5dAI8 You're right, it needs to be edited and some work has to done about the ins and outs of maintaining an economical, sensible amount of levain and building it to the required amount of any given recipe when needed so there's as little waste as possible.

I agree with you, it's really bad to see enough levain to make 4 to 5 good size loaves go to the trash like that. I guess that confirms and illustrates well what they say: If everybody on the planet lived like we do in North America, we would need 7 planets Earth to sustain the human race. And that's without even touching the heart-breaking subject of people trying, in vain, to make ends meet and feed their family.

us can live so extravagantly, want to or do but, N. America is a fantasy land perfect for Disneyland's birthplace. To see a more real world, all you have to do is go other less wistful places that don't enjoy the best of anything much less the best of everything. We are blessed for sure and I can't help but think it would help others less fortunate if we acted like it.

There is no reason to build such large levains .......and throw them away. I make 80 g of starter at 65% hydration, keep it in the fridge and made 4-6 loaves of bread from it before feeding it back to 80 g . We usually bake one loaf of bread at a time and build exactly the amount of levain we need for every bake with no waste at all - with the exception of the recent panettone where it took 4-5 of the next bakes to use up the extra levain - but none was thrown away. Won't ever do that again since it isn't required.

Hopefully, others can be converted to be levain conservationists too! Conservation is a good thing and waste is always bad. Best to lead by example :-)

Ok, my Overnight Country Blonde is at its first bulk rising stage. Somehow I wasn't attentive (2 teenagers + 2 young 20 years old invading and occupying the kitchen can do that to you) and I had built 250 g of levain for the 1st mix.

i've been reading this exchange, since i too have the book, and from the beginning have made just 50% of his levain, figuring there's less 'spent fuel' to dispose of. but i'm wondering

1. will it work to do just 25% of his amounts?

2. those of you who only keep 80g of starter, will that work for somebody like me who keeps the starter in the fridge, and only bakes once a week? or is that small amount best for somebody who keeps starter out on counter & feeds daily? i'd like to figure out the optimum (smallest) amount of starter that i can keep in the fridge, feed & build once a week and still use a forkish-like recipe.

so is this the answer to my question? --
"I put my 30 g batch of levain in the fridge when I know I'll be out most of the week. I do it once the levain has risen, when it's at its peak. Again, no problem to have it back to full blown activity after removing it from the fridge and feeding it, as long as I don't throw away the liquid that sits on top of it (dark if older and clear if it was in the fridge for less than a week). I just mix the levain well, incorporating back the separated liquid and I feed it in its entirety (30 g levain + 30 g flour + 30 g water)."

1. keep 30g levain in the fridge for a week
2. when ready to bake, remove from fridge, feed levain 30/30/30 twice (over 12-24 hours?)
3. proceed with Forkish or any other recipe

there should never be any separated liquid in starters, This only happens for starter that are very liquid and vastly underfed. When it separates it means that the starter is starved for food. Chad Robertson and Forkish seem to be the main proponents of liquid young starters and I used to keep a quart jar of mine that way in the fridge, it always was starved for food in less than a week,. If you want to make bread that has less SD tang made with a young starter like they do then you use their methods for starters and levains and live with the waste, extra costs and effort to maintain them. It is a personal choice and as a bread libertarian I have no problems with anyone doing so and as I said i used to do so myself.

But not more. I learned that I can build levains, from my always refrigerated 80 g of starter to the exact amount needed for any recipe and it will be at full strength redy to do its job. Since the starter is a rye based whole grain one, that has a low hydration, it also produces a more sour bread. All of the starter waste, muss and fuss are gone and the bread is better - at least for my taste buds. Bt you can easily bake a Forkish bread from it too.

You can try out this method of starter while keeping your old starter going to see if you like it.

Take some of your existing starter and get it to 66% hydration by weight and full strength by taking some of it and feeding it flour to get it to 66% - it doesn't have to be perfect. I don't know what your current starter hydration is so I can't help you do that.

Once it is at full strength, take 10 g of it (there are 6 g of flour and 4 g of water in the total 10 g) and feed it 10 g of flour and 8 g of water and let it double - 6 hours or less if your starter was at full strength. This will make the starter 75% hydration with 16 g of flour and 12 g of water for a total of 28 g. Then feed it 20 g each of flour and water and let it double again. This will give you an 88 % hydration starter that has 36 g of flour and 32 g of water for a total of 68 g. Once doubled then feed it 12 g of flour only and let it sit on the counter for 1 hour before refrigerating it. You now have a 66% hydration starter with 48 g of flour and 32 g of water.

This will last 2 weeks if you are baking a loaf of bread a week using 20 g of starter for each bake. After 2 weeks you will have 40 g to bake another bread on week 3 and leave 20 g to build the new starter back to 80 g by using half or using the whole 20 g and making 90 g ofr the fridge instead if 80g.

When you want to make a bread that requires 240 g of full strength starter at 100 hydration as example, just build it like you do your starter. Do (3) 4 hour builds or (2) 6 hour ones or (1) 12 of hours , You want to sure to increase the flour and water for each build. if doing more than one build.

Using 20 g of starter for the levain seed it would have be 12 g of flour and 8 g of water. For a (3) stage build the first build would be say 25 g of flour and 20 g of water giving you 70 g total at 75.7% hydration. 4 hours later feed it 35 g of flour and 35 g of water giving you 135 g total at 87.5 % hydration. The 3rd feeding 4 hours later would be 48 g of flour and 57 g of water for 240 g total of 100% hydration levain - half each of flour and water at 120 g each. After 4 hours, or no more than 6 hours, the levain should have doubled and be ready to use at the proper hydration and amount for the recipe - no waste.

You can do (2) 6 hour builds by taking the 3rd build amounts above and adding half of it to builds 1 and 2. You cn also do one 12 hour build too. I have done all of them and they all work fine.

so i have my 80g of starter, have built it up as you suggested. my old starters (3 times as much water/flour) are safe in the basement fridge as i experiment with this new method. starter goes into the fridge now and I
will take out 20g each time i bake.

i never realized that you could remove a small amount of starter from the 'mother' and not feed the mother all over. i guess most of what i've read says to take starter out of fridge, throw out most of it, use 20g for new bread, and refresh the 'mother' before putting back into fridge. i didn't realize you could remove 20g at a time, and not actually feed the 'mother' til it gets low.

wow, this is terrific information, exactly what i've been trying to figure out on my own. i will keep my own starters going (I have two 6-year old starters, one firm, and one more liquid) but will now try this one, and if it works, then i will switch to just the one starter, which makes so much more sense to me!! thanks so much

The final dough requires 540g Levain. My thought is that there's no need to create any more than that with my mature starter.

To achieve the 540g needed for final dough, are three basic steps:
a. refresh starter (his recipe yields1000 g) i figure I need no more than 250g, so i can cut his amounts down to 1/4
b. first levain feeding (his recipe yields 500 g) i figure i don't need any more than 125 g, so i can cut his amounts down to 1/4
c. second levain feeding (his recipe yields 1150g); but since we only need 540g for the final dough, i can cut second feeding down by half, which gives me the 550g i need for the final dough.

i figure that way i don't waste so much flour, etc. so that's my experiment this evening, will see how it works out.

I couldn't believe it when I only ended up using a small amount of the levain..I skimmed through the chapters on levain and didn't read anywhere about throwing so much away. Will definitely be using some of the methods in this thread to minimize the waste next time I bake.

I live at 5,000 feet and need to adjust my sour dough recipes and all of the recipes from Ken Forkish's book and I haven't been able to successfully make that adjustment. Does anyone have a suggestion. This forum is new to me and I'm not sure if I'm doing this correctly, maybe not so tricky after all.

In general for bread the recommendation at hight altitudes is a little extra water, increased oven temp, and shorter bake. Rise times might be faster too. That said, for lean doughs I would think not much needs to be done (maybe shorter bake time). Especially with Forkish sourdough recipes. Those already have a high hydration and sourdough is not as fast anyway. My recommendation would to be to try it as written. What have you tried so far?

Yeast deep inside a giant ball of dough are a long way from the air and oxygen surrounding it, so if oxygen doesn't diffuse through dough quickly enough, those yeast will have less oxygen to work with than the yeast in small dough balls. There's a reason small levain batches might ferment more quickly.

Hi.. I just came across this thread as I am trying to figure out what to do with my levain tonight. I'm baking my way through FWSY and have just started the levain process but hit a problem. As an aside, I totally agree with the thread above that there is just too much waste in throwing away all this levain. But until I get it "made" and stabilized I think I should just keep going.

So it's day three, all looks good. But tonight when I went to check on it I noticed that there is liquid forming around the edge of my bowl. I think this means that it's starving. But I fed it this morning per the instruction of keeping about 1/4 of the levain from yesturday and adding 500g of water and 500g of flour. My kitchen temp looks to be about 73 from my instant read thermometer and the levain itself is at about 77 degrees.

I don't want the starter to be too sour as I prefer "sweeter" sour dough. Should I feed it tonight, or leave it and feed it in the morning per the book schedule?

This morning I left about 1/4 of the starter in the bowl - so say about 250grams or so - and added 500 grams of 90 degree water and 500 grams of whole wheat flour.. so maybe all in about 1200 - 1300 grams or so total.. looks good, bubbly, etc.. except for the water starting to pool on the top..

So I appreciate that at this point I'm probably "talking to myself", but I realized by searching TFL that it's hooch - or alcohol forming on the top of the starter because it's "tired" and it won't cause much of a problem. What I now don't understand is how a starter can get tired after just three days in with full morning feedings.. lets see how it goes..

After reading everything, and because it wasn't too much hooch, I decided to just now to give the whole thing a good mix. It looks good post the mix, and is a slowly continuing to be bubbling bowl of goop. It only smells like alcohol. I started the starter on Tuesday, so it's the third day/feed as of this morning. It rose to a double and then fell back both yesterday and today. .. i'm surprised at how fast this has became active.. I think for tomorrow morning's feed I'm going to scale this back to 100g grams of starter and go from there... the volumes are just huge.. would you agree?

The bubbles you see are essentially fool's gold. It will go through phases where it may give off a foul odor or appear to have gone dormant. For now, cover it and leave it out at room temperature, stirring once per day with no more "feedings". It needs about another week, at which time it should smell somewhat yeasty.

This has been the most interesting part of baking through FWSY.. I've just spent the past few hours reading through this site and others on starters. I came across some other comments you made regarding starters and ultimately just found myself reading Debra Wink's Pineapple Solution entries, comments and replies. Unfortunately, I now realize you're right. How could Forkish possibly think that anyone could start a starter and bake on day 5? I guess I'll be using a poolish this weekend instead! And definitely, no way am I feeding with his volumes going forward! Thanks for your support!

The Internet is the worst place to learn to make sourdough starter unless you luck into someone who knows what he/she is talking about. There are books and YouTube videos that are also quite bad.

Ken Forkish runs a retail bakery. Clearly he can't relate to the occasional, casual baker and the quantities they need, with all the discard and waste he recommends. I've watched his videos -- eventually I start to cringe. He doesn't seem like he's "all there".

In centuries past, flour was milled by hand. You didn't just pick up the phone (no phones) and order a 50-pound sack of flour, only to discard such a large percentage of it.

I applaud Debra Wink's research but am not on board with the "pineapple juice solution". To begin with, you have to keep diluting and discarding just to get the pineapple taste out of your starter. The non-problem it purports to solve will resolve itself in a few days without pineapple juice or otherwise manipulating the pH. It's a solution looking for a problem.

When I was trying to get a starter going, a guy on this board told me to just mix flour and water and let them sit. That's all, just flour and water, just like the sourdough bakers in the Pyrenees used to do in the olden days. That's what I did and by golly he was right. I still use that starter.

Making the starter is the first step. Using it is quite a different proposition.

I tried starting a starter twenty years ago when I first got married. My wife thought i was mad as I put some flour, water and grapes in a bowl and began to let my concoction brew away. That was in the days before the internet, let alone bread forums. And try as I might, it was terrible and I eventually gave up on the idea of levain as I'm not a sour sour-dough guy. There was no easy place to learn or connect with other bakers short of walking into a bakery and say 'tell me how to do this'! But you're right, the internet overload of information is mostly useless but there are some remarkable spots like this community blog.

It's only been in the past year that I came back to bread baking on a weekly basis. My baking FWSY, over any other book - even with the Bakers Apprentice sitting on my shelf - for no other reason than I tripped on the book while reading about bread one day I ordered it, and thought why not. All the recipes have been good , but his time lines are stupidly long - at least in my kitchen. Probably all of my time lines for the overnight breads would work better if I reduced his time guidelines by about 75%.

This week I'm just at the developing a levain part of his book this week. I don't have an existing one. And I'm glad I had hooch on it, because it had me spend a few hours last night reading about levain and minimum quantities required. As I think about your comments regarding Debra's work, they make sense. But what she really did is give me a very good idea of what's going inside the starter and it becomes clear from her work that what you say would work. She implies it very clearly.

As an aside, just as I started the levain a few days ago I thought to ask my 80 year old mom "what did you do for yeast in the old days"? It was an interesting conversation. She said that the ladies in the small rural village would just share a stater with each other as they usually only had one big bake a week - 13 massive loaves (probably 16 - 24 inches across) in her mom's case. That was her earliest recollection of the process. But said that eventually they would just keep some fermented dough in a plate - no more than a few tablespoons worth rolled into a small ball - and let it dry out completely. It would sit in that way until the next bake when it was then re-hydrated. Then that slurry 'starter' would be added to their large mount of flour and salted water, and the process began again. It's remarkable how little starter would be used considering how much flour they where using for 13 large loaves.

Her comments made me think to try it her way and make an experiment of it. In a month or so when my starter is fully mature and strong enough, I'm going to dry out a small amount of dough and give her method a try - on a much smaller scale of course!

In the meanwhile, I took your advice last night and gave the levain a stir and let it sit. I also now thought I have so much of it, that I can use it as a learning lesson. I'm going to leave most of it alone as you suggest. I'm also going to take 50 grams and use a 1/2 pint jar and use the 1:2:2 ratio of daily feeds and see how she goes. I'm also going to take another 25 grams and do the same in another bowl. I want to see how small a starter I can reasonably keep at active at this stage. Either way, I'll be saving a lot more flour than FWSY calls for.

Forkish's Levain build is a funny one. I used to just think he was mad until I tried his recipes which are very nice indeed and found new respect for him. He is a professional baker and i'm just a novice. So obviously there is some good reason for this seemingly crazy builds. However...

I think with every recipe he is assuming you don't have a starter. Therefore the starter build is each one is actually creating one from scratch. But, and this should be clearer, if one has an on going starter then by all means miss that part out and build just enough to go into a recipe.

There is no way that every time one bakes one should build so much extra only to discard.

Many of his recipes start off with the same build so by all means do one crazy build and bake 3 or 4 breads or different kind of breads with this one build.

I only keep a small amount at any one time but no less then 1 tablespoon as I hear this is the bare minimum for keeping a healthy starter. Should I find that I do have enough I might use it straight into a dough. But more often then not I find I need to build a preferment. And of course if a recipe calls for mature starter i'll take a little off to feed and when ready go onto the recipe. There's really no need for any discard whatsoever.

As I said, Forkish is unable to relate to the home baker who bakes occasionally and in small quantities. All he knows is how to run his retail bakery. It makes me wonder what business he has writing books aimed at a general audience.

There is a certain culture here at IBM that says doing the right way is better than doing it the practical way. I will point to his story about insisting on French sea salt as an example of that IBM ah.... hyper focus on detail. =)

It is kinda funny that when reading the formula for starter I automatic saw the IBM influence on his process... and cut it down significantly as I could see his scale was for larger operations. In essence, a Mainframe solution for a PC sized problem. It was the right way vrs the practical way.

Does Forkish have any business writing for a general audience? I think it is proof that he does as his book sells so well. I would also point out that it is a very solid process. You could scale his process from making a couple of loaves to running your own bakery. That he gives out that much information is stunning... another common IBMer trait.

But it is very technical, much like reading The Professional Chef and applying the lessons to home cooking. Which if you makes you a damn fine cook btw.

I didn't know of his IBM roots. That fact provides an interesting insight into the book. As to "should he have written it?", I personally think it's a very good book that methodically goes through a process of exploration of "how to". Other than the levain volume issue, I think it's been a great experience (I'm blogging it on my own site elsewhere to keep my thoughts in one place). I'll look up The Professional Chef - I haven't heard of that book. Thank you for the comment!

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